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Monthly Dividend and Real Estate update – July 2017

The past month has been flying by like crazy. The plans for the wedding are really taking shape and I’ve, completely unexpected, bought a wedding dress. With ‘only’ 9 months to go, the coming month we will be deciding on the invitations and flowers (Pinterest really became my friend in this).

But the even bigger news here is that we have bought a rental property!

Oh yes, and of course we are receiving dividends as well. Still collecting without even lifting a finger. Talking about the power of passive income here.

I’ve started and experimented with posting 2 times a week in July, but then I forgot that I still needed a wedding to plan, a rental property to buy and the busiest season ever at work had just started. So, next to working 50 hours a week, blogging became less of a priority and I took the time to arrange other projects first.

An interesting fact is that I got more traffic, even without posting more often. My goal is to keep growing the blog and therefore will be publishing at least once a week but without a structured schedule. They will be published whenever possible.

Real Estate update

Whoop, we did it! I’ll start this update with the most important one: we actually found and bought a rental property 🙂

We are completing the last few things before it’s all final. The last few weeks we have been spending a lot of time on researching, discussing the deal with others and calculating all the numbers. Because of the hot market right now, we had to act quickly and we made an offer only days after we had first seen the property. We were able to pull this off because we already had inquired on the possibilities of getting a mortgage beforehand. We had a plan A, plan B, and a plan C when it came down to funding.

So far, we’re very pleased with how it’s working out and extremely happy with the terms we were able to negotiate for the mortgage. There are still a few things that have to be taken care off, but I will be posting the details on this deal very shortly.

This will also be the last update about real estate sneaked in the dividend portfolio update. As of next month, I will be posting updates on real estate separately.

Dividend and passive income update

Talking real numbers here. We’ve managed to collect €26.64 in dividends the past month. Might not seem that impressive, but it’s a 29.5% increasevs. last year. And take in mind that we haven’t invested in stocks for the last 6 months.

We got paid by 3 different companies, Bank of Nova Scotia, Walt Disney and Nike. Two of them we held last year, and Nike is the new kid on the block.

I’ve also managed to sell some books again and sold off a few items that were laying around but we never used. That brought in an additional 34.13 euro. I’m still decluttering from time to time, and listing items for sale we don’t need anymore. I’m progressing slowly as this isn’t a high priority right now, but it still brings in small amounts of money every month.

Portfolio update

Our progress is slightly deteriorating, as we didn’t bring any new stock additions since February. Instead, we chose to use our savings for our down payment on our rental property. Because the transfer date for the property isn’t until late of November. We also won’t add any stocks to our portfolio until then.

Last July was the first in three months to show growth again in our portfolio. An interesting side effect of not adding additional money is that all fluctuations we see, are purely from capital appreciation.

Our portfolio is currently worth 46436.22 euro. Just slightly higher than where we ended the month before. Still, we have grown our portfolio with 51.6% since July last year. The gap between last years results and this is getting smaller and smaller.

Since we have bought our rental property, tracking the portfolio progress isn’t sufficient anymore to track our overall progress. For this reason, I’m going to start to track our net worth. Although in the end, cash flow means more to us, tracking our net worth is a perfect method to give an overall insight into our performance.

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31 thoughts on “Monthly Dividend and Real Estate update – July 2017”

Great progress you guys are making! Best of luck with the rental property. Are you going to reinvest the RE proceeds back in the dividend growth stocks, paying down the investment mortgage, or saving up for another property?

The mortgage: principal payments + interest will be paid by the tenant. For now (this may change in the future), our goal is to use the principal payments (return on the equity) to fund new properties.

The free cash flow (profit) will be invested in stocks and/or new properties.

In general, we want to achieve a minimum of 10% return on our investments. Therefore the cost of equity would also be a minimum of 10%. Paying off the investment mortgage would mean an opportunity loss since the cost of debt (interest rate) is only 2.7% in our case.

Any growth is good growth. Close to 30% is great, especially for not buying anything for 6 months. It is difficult when you have other big expenditures like that to pay for. Congrats on the rental as well!

Great things all around here Divnomcs. What can’t you like in this update! Strong dividend growth and the purchase of a rental property….YES! Amazing things and the results are just going to continue to get better and better over the next few years.

July is always a hard month for me in terms of blogging. It’s so busy at work and then I want to be outside so it takes a back burner. I’m really looking forward to your rental property paying off and seeing how that all works out for your guys. I’ve been really interested in doing a rental property myself but just haven’t gotten around to it.

Congrats on the rental property purchase. I already commented on a couple other blogs that it seems more and more of our fellow DGI peers are buying real estate either for themselves or as a rental. The tide has definitely shifted as RE seems the place most are going towards. Nice year over year gain with your dividend income. I always say it’s not about the amount as much as the fact that you started on this journey and are showing progress. Keep up the good work and try to enjoy the wedding process 🙂

Congrats on the rental property! I’m looking forward to tracking your progress with it in the future. That will be nice to have some passive income coming from a source other than dividend stocks. I also like the names you’re holding in your dividend portfolio (DIS, NKE), those should be great companies to hold long-term. Thanks for sharing your numbers!